Cave Exploration 2
Han Se-ah and the rest of our party paid no mind to the cave walls. It wasn't as if worms or ghost-type monsters were about to burst through the stone, and this was no underground dungeon laced with traps.
But viewers with nothing better to do will fixate on anything. Rather than tensely watching the darkness ripple along the cave passage, a whole bizarre throng of them preferred to zero in on Grace's swaying hair or the fluttering hem of Irene's nun's habit.
"There's a pattern on the wall? I don't think I saw anything."
"Miss Hanna? Is something wrong with your magic?"
"Hmm… Irene, did you notice anything strange on the cave walls?"
At the booming donation alert, Han Se-ah's steps began to falter. Donations weren't like chat—they didn't refresh instantly—so by the time she got the tip, they'd already walked well past the wall that supposedly had a pattern on it.
Curiosity and regret made her glance back, her pace slowing, and Irene and Kayden beside her both turned to look.
"No, I didn't see anything."
"Neither did I. Is there something magical about it?"
Of course neither of them would have spotted anything—exploration wasn't their specialty. Even I, after ten years grinding as an adventurer, had never heard of anything being carved into cave walls. Still, I couldn't dismiss it as pure nonsense.
We'd already unlocked a sub-quest and taken a moss-gathering request for hair loss, of all things. If something was going to appear on a cave wall, that was just how games worked.
Just because a Full Moon Wolf showed up on the 10th floor and an Orc Chieftain on the 20th didn't mean the game would keep lazily repeating the pattern—30th-floor boss, 40th-floor boss, and so on. That would just mean the developers had done a terrible job. There might be a clue waiting on the 21st floor, or an event that triggered every five floors.
"I think there might be something on the cave walls. It could be my imagination, but I'll take a look."
At Han Se-ah's abrupt remark, the party's eyes went round and every gaze swung toward me. We hadn't said a word about cave walls, so of course they were confused. But I didn't know anything either, so I just shrugged.
With that, the party pressed on, the tip about the walls tucked away in the backs of their minds. Han Se-ah's words must have stuck with them, though—I could see their heads swiveling left and right even from the front of the line.
The trust they'd built in her as a player ran deep enough that nobody wrote it off as nonsense. If some other adventurer had said the same thing, they'd have gotten an earful about drinking too much the night before. But when Han Se-ah spoke, it wasn't just that they'd believe her if she claimed red beans made soybean paste—they'd believe her if she claimed soybean paste made red beans, because she was a mage and that was just how it worked.
"Hey, everyone who tipped before the autopsy, speak up. You said there was a pattern on the wall—explain it. I appreciate the donations, but the timing was so late we already walked past it. I can't exactly ask Roland to reverse just because of a donation, so hurry up."
"That is not true! …Though I am genuinely grateful for the ten thousand."
Even while bickering back and forth with her viewers, Han Se-ah kept sweeping the cave walls as she advanced. But after the cave spiders, a pack of kobolds, and a hunt for vampire bats, they still hadn't found a single wall carved with an unusual pattern.
Because of that, the party's head-swiveling gradually tapered off, and both Han Se-ah and her chat were drifting toward the conclusion that the wall pattern had either been a trick of the darkness or a deliberate lie for the sake of engagement.
Until Irene called my name.
"Um, Roland?"
"What's up?"
"I briefly saw something strange over here. It seems like you only notice it when that torch-type magic tool gets close to the wall…"
Irene, who had taken Han Se-ah's word as absolute gospel, had kept studying the walls without a hint of fatigue—and she'd found something.
Han Se-ah whipped her head around so hard I worried her neck might snap, hair flying, while the rest of the party approached with eyes full of curiosity. At Irene's request, I pressed the magic tool against the cave wall as if I meant to write on it.
The rough, uneven surface, catching the soft light, smoothed out as if it had been artificially worked. It wasn't that a pattern appeared—only a section of the wall went smooth, and the shadows of nearby stalagmites and stalactites, combined with the wavering light, must have made it look like a design.
Even a country bumpkin with no adventuring experience would have found this wall suspicious. In the middle of a rugged cave, a smooth square tile about thirty centimeters on each side was set into the stone.
"What… is this?"
"Roland, do you know anything?"
"No. First time I've seen anything like it exploring the Tower. I've never heard of caves having something like this."
Space was tight, so I—in my large, heavy armor—stepped back a pace, and the cluster of small heads, brimming with curiosity, huddled together. They pressed in like puppies shoving their faces into a feed bowl. Even Kayden had completely forgotten she was cross-dressing as a man, stuck right in there with the rest of them—it was almost painfully cute.
They brought the torch-type magic tool I'd handed over close, then pulled it away again. They tapped the smooth section with a sword hilt, rubbed it with their palms, trying every experiment imaginable like children conducting their first science project.
Since the path was narrow anyway, with me blocking the front and Kayden and Irene covering the rear, there was no real risk of ambush—so the whole party clung to the cave wall like kids solving a puzzle.
But no matter how gently they stroked it or how firmly they tapped it, the tile set into the wall didn't budge. It looked for all the world like a mission panel from an escape-room or horror game full of puzzle elements, yet it gave no response at all.
Then a hypothesis suddenly occurred to me.
Wasn't that thing some kind of switch or button? And in a fantasy world like this, switches and buttons naturally ran on mana instead of electricity.
"Hanna, how about pouring some mana into it?"
"Mana?"
"Don't just touch it with a mana-charged hand—inject mana directly through that wall surface into the cave beyond, like you're activating a magic tool."
If that was a light switch, then treat the wall beyond like the wiring and dump mana into it.
I rephrased the advice as carefully as I could, though the blunt version had nearly slipped out in my impatience. She understood perfectly anyway—Han Se-ah immediately leveled her staff.
Instead of her palm, a mass of mana rose above the staff and seeped into the wall like rainwater soaking into dry earth. All that practice moving mana around with her staff for the minimap had paid off—her control was excellent.
And as the wall drank in the mana, a visible change began.
"It feels like… the mana is just getting sucked away…"
"It reacted to a mage. Could another mage have left something behind?"
Blue lines of mana etched themselves across the smooth surface. Whether it was a monster's mana stone or a raw lump of mana that hadn't yet become a spell, that familiar blue of this fantasy world crawled along the wall.
It was less a switch than a circuit board—the mana lines scattered chaotically, spreading from the smooth section out across the rough stone of the cave. Blue mana-light snaked along the walls through the dim cavern.
"…Ah. Pathfinding just got completely wrecked."
As the extended mana faded into the gloom and the cave transformed in silence, Han Se-ah's face went rigid.
No matter how you looked at it, the passage ahead was no longer a narrow cave tunnel—it was something much closer to a maze.
Floors 21 through 30 of the Tower were cave terrain.
Or rather—they had been cave terrain.
Narrow, uneven passages held cave spiders and vampire bats; sudden open clearings bristled with stalactites and stalagmites where goblins, kobolds, and the like swarmed in droves. Safe zones were clearings at dead ends, flat enough to pitch a tent village.
Yes. Had been.
"Which fork is this?"
"Already the eighth."
Grace's face had darkened, her expression growing even more serious as she scanned the surroundings. Even for a twisting, winding cave, there had never been this many branching paths.
Before they'd poured mana into the wall, a fork had appeared maybe once every thirty minutes. Now two- and three-way splits kept showing up as if five minutes was already too long to wait. If Han Se-ah had been a player without a minimap, she might well have starved to death in here.
"At least with the minimap we don't have to worry about walking in circles, but I still have no idea what's going on. Do we have to find all those flat panels in the maze and pour mana into them? You know, like those horror games where you flip a bunch of levers and switches inside a labyrinth."
The problem was that no quest window had appeared for Han Se-ah yet.
A cave field suddenly turning into a maze field—what kind of design was this, seriously?